- Hey, over here.

- We're Gertrude Hawk Chocolates.

- We're filled with creamy peanut butter.

(screen popping) (machine whirring) - So, how do we put the magic into this chocolate that you eat?

Oh, there's a story.

(David laughing) (playful music) Well, this company was founded really a situation of making lemonade out of lemons.

My grandmother, who was Gertrude Hawk, always say, "You could never make up a name like that."

At 19, she marries my grandfather.

Along comes the Depression, and it got bleaker and bleaker for my grandparents financially.

And so, in 1936, she started to dip chocolates in her kitchen, but it was my dad that came along and said, "Mom, I think we can make that hobby a business."

(birds chirping) - So, Gerhard Hawk Chocolates is a family-owned chocolate company.

- Since I was five years old, I was fascinated with it.

I just couldn't get enough of it.

The kids would go, they'd wanna play baseball, I'd wanna go to work with my dad.

- We have retail stores in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, and we have an e-commerce website that will ship anywhere within the contiguous USA and still to this day is operated in Northeastern Pennsylvania.

Our headquarters are in Dunmore.

- Within four and a half hours you can go from Boston down to Washington DC.

- We are currently run by the fourth generation of Hawks.

So, Gertrude's great grandson is now the CEO of our company.

(gentle upbeat music) - Well, in the very early 1980s, there was a gentleman, a process engineer in Redditch, England, name was Arthur Westbrook.

And he developed a process where you could actually, mold a chocolate piece in a mold with a center inside of it.

And this was such a revolutionary idea most people in the industry didn't believe it would really work.

And so, in the spring of 1984, 2 of my colleagues and I went to Redditch, England to take a look at this thing.

And I'll never forget this.

We walked in, he showed us the machine running, and it was magic.

And the next day I sat down with my dad.

He said, "Buy it."

We risked every penny we made that year in profit.

We put the line in just in time for Christmas production.

The very first item we ran on the line was peanut butter-filled Smidgens.

This is 40 years ago.

It shot to number one.

It was our number one product that year, and it has been so every year since.

- So, we monitor the temperature closely and the humidity, because humidity and chocolate don't get along well, 'cause chocolate and water don't mix.

It's a lot more scientific than I would've ever thought.

I'm in a meeting all day today about what fat would be the best to use in this product based on what melting point we want it at.

There's all those little nuances.

So, if it's really humid, things get tacky.

Things don't set up correctly.

So, we wanna make sure we have a nice low humidity and also a nice low temperature on the outside packing portion of our production area.

(gentle upbeat music) - So, how do we put the magic into this chocolate that you eat?

We take a depositing plate, and if you look closely, there's an inside center tube and there's an outside ring.

The peanut butter flows through the center tube.

The chocolate flows through the outer ring.

The machine starts by just depositing chocolate.

Then it co-deposits peanut butter and chocolate, and then it ends with just chocolate.

Now, that sounds simple, but especially with the kind of controls they had in the 1980s, to have that kind of control on the product was very, very difficult.

And you had to have just exactly the right flow characteristics of the chocolate and the peanut butter, because if it's not perfectly aligned when it goes into the mold, it doesn't conform to the shape of the Santa.

- [Narrator] Now, get delectably, delicious Gertrude Hawk Santa Smidgens in new holiday packs.

On sale to make your holidays perfect.

- I think one thing that's really nice about our products is there's still a lot of human element to it.

We don't have a ton of automation.

The Smidgens are made in the one-shot shell molding process, as David said, but once they get out of that mold, they're hand packed into the bags and then put into boxes.

- People come to work and they really feel like they're doing something more than just earning some money.

That's really the heart of what makes working here different I believe.

You can get up on Christmas morning and say, "Hey, you know, people are enjoying what we make and they enjoy it as a family."

It brings families together.

It's just a gift, and it's a gift my grandmother gave us.

(gentle music)